


Timescales

by Beleriandings



Category: Akatsuki no Yona | Yona of the Dawn
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 22:22:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8178281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: Days and weeks and months were useful when one lives a normal life, a human life. For Zeno, it was all waiting; a waiting that might never have any end.





	

“ _Monster!_ ”

It was a familiar word.

Zeno hadn’t meant for these people to see him as anything other than a common travelling priest, or maybe a trader or a wanderer if he was feeling less like explaining himself. People always asked more questions of priests. People always seemed to want reassurance. Most of the time, Zeno found he had none to give. 

And so sometimes he lied about who he was, or lied by omission.

 _Fool, Ouryuu. You are_ always _lying about who you are, for if you tell the truth they will hunt you down for a monster. You have no place in this world built for the cycle of human lifetimes, you are a useless leftover of another time, nothing else. But still you just can’t die, just can’t leave the world to carry on in peace, even when you have no purpose here._

The worst part him spoke like that sometimes, and actually the rest of him was sometimes inclined to agree.

 _Monster_. The word followed him wherever he went, materialising like smoke whenever he let his powers show.

The people of this village were superstitious; it was only natural, with the hard-scrabble life they lived in these mountains, rocks and peaks brooding over them like tall stone figures - perhaps the rearing heads of stern and unyielding gods - black against the bright sky.

He travelled to such places sometimes, in the times when the sound of human voices filled him with peace and comfort.

(That was not always the case; sometimes they sent discomfort clawing its way up his throat, unreality pressing in at him like a thick choking mass. But sometimes he found he could take solace in the company of others.)

He had gone to the village and gotten work to do, lifting and carrying; the regular sort of work that most people did. They were building a new house, and the man had scoffed when Zeno had come to him, with his thin and fragile looking limbs, asking to help in return for a little food and some conversation.

Zeno was not strong, but he was stronger than he looked at least, and when he was persistent the man’s skepticism had turned to acceptance. 

Zeno had worked all day, talking to the men who were lifting and winching up beams, who were lashing ropes and hammering in nails. He had enjoyed the company, and they had enjoyed his even if they clearly found him strange, and they had all smiled under the weak, cloud-filtered midday sun.

That had been until a heavy beam had slipped, falling square on Zeno’s head and knocking him to the earth. A simple accident, the sort that happened sometimes, the chance they all took with this kind of work.

But take enough slim chances, wait long enough, and freak accidents - events that others might call improbable or fateful - become as familiar as the rising and setting of the sun. Zeno knew that well by now.

Shadows had loomed over him as he lay crushed and bleeding on the ground, the dread that the day had banished beginning to paw at him once more; accusatory faces, staring down. _We know what you are; you lied to us_.

He had been waiting for something like this to happen; he always was, whenever he pretended to be able to speak to people once more, he was always waiting for the end he knew must come.

In reality, the faces were not accusatory, but horrified, eyes wide with a terror he knew well. Mouths whispered the familiar word as he pushed off the beam and rose to his feet, touching the multiple cracks in his skull gingerly as the splintered bone and sticky, spongey flesh knitted back together with a rather sickening crunching sound. The crown of his head had been crushed like an egg, but it was healing. There was blood in his hair, running down the side of his face, but after a mere moment more there was no wound under it. 

He wiped the blood off his hand on the side of his robes and tried to smile. _There might still be a chance that they would not_ -

“Monster…”

“Evil spirit! Get out!”

“No, no, capture him! If he gets out…”

“It’s our children he wants, I bet.”

“Monster…”

“ _Monster!_ ”

Zeno sighed, extending a blood-smeared hand. “Please, it’s not like that, it’s…”

But he never finished. There were too many of them, stabbing at him with knives and farm tools and building tools, keeping him in the centre of a circle of fear when his cuts healed. 

Soon enough, they called over a wise man who knew a monster and a demon when he saw one. One who called himself a priest, like Zeno.

That man had also recoiled in fear, had also proclaimed Zeno an evil spirit, a thing that should be long dead come to haunt the living.

Zeno couldn’t even quite say he disagreed.

They grabbed Zeno’s wrists and ankles, slipping a sack over his head and bonds about his limbs.

They were very strong together, and Zeno was not very good at fighting strong people who were not trying to kill him. He was good at fighting to the death, but not for his freedom _. Well, that was the way of the power of Ouryuu, wasn’t it?_

They put him in a cage made of tightly-lashed bamboo, hung from a high pole on a clifftop. The cage creaked and swung in the breeze. _And there you’ll stay until the vultures come for your dead body. If we can’t kill you, they will tear your living flesh from your bones. Let’s see you survive that._

Zeno almost laughed at that; he knew as well as anyone - or possibly better than most - that vultures didn’t eat living flesh. He supposed he would just have to sit here until the ropes frayed, the cage broke apart. Even if they built a new one, he would outlast the village itself, he knew with a tired certainty. 

He would be cold and hungry, but it wouldn’t harm him.

Besides, it wasn’t as though he had anything else to be doing.

After a while the vultures did come, circling and waiting.

_Well, if he didn’t know something of that himself._

“Zeno’s sorry to disappoint you” he said, stretching a hand out for a vulture to land on. “But Zeno’s not likely to die anytime soon.” The vulture croaked its displeasure, beating its wings at him, but it landed anyway, another landing on the top of the cage above his head. The birds were heavier than they looked, as the cage tilted violently as it swung, bobbing chaotically back and forth. For a moment, Zeno hoped that it might fall, breaking open on the ground and letting him escape, but he had no such luck. The villagers apparently knew their business when building cages for monsters and demons.

The vultures weren’t so bad though, he thought; he even talked to them sometimes, though they didn’t talk back. They held no fear for Zeno, these creatures that feasted on dead flesh. 

But after a while even the vultures stopped coming. They must have realised they would find no carrion here and given up, Zeno thought, as he tapped at the lashed bamboo of his cage distractedly. He wished he could at least get up and pace, but there was not even space to stand, let alone walk anywhere.

He supposed he had no reason to be restless; after all, he knew patience. Sometimes he thought it was all he knew. But he could wait; give it time. 

Time always won, in the end.

He didn’t count time much anymore, so he didn’t know how long it was until rope gave way at last. It was actually the rope that hung the cage from its hook above, not those binding the bamboo, that failed first; he supposed the howling wind’s constant spinning and twisting took their toll on it. Zeno had to thank the wind for that, even as he had cursed it many times during those… _months? Years?_ When the winter winds blew, it was bitterly cold in the cage, completely devoid of shelter, and his clothes were light, and threadbare on top of it. He was hungry and thirsty too, a constant, torturous ache. _Why had the dragon god left him hunger, the sensation that tells us when to eat lest we die, if he could not die of starvation? Why could he still feel pain at all, for that matter? If pain was a warning not to get hurt, then why not remove it along with his body’s fragility, his ability to die?_

These questions and more had been circling around his head for centuries, and with little else to do they tormented him worse than ever.

He had no answers of course; the voice of Ouryuu in his head was as absent as it had been all these years, since the very beginning.

Birds came, sometimes, birds of all kinds;  migratory birds passing by, the falcons that made their stony homes on the cliff, more carrion birds croaking and screeching their disapproval at their lack of a meal. Many of those. Still, Zeno was grateful for any break in the monotony.

They all soon flew away again.

Once in spring, there was even a songbird that came and perched at the top of his cage, chirruping and flapping. “You’re lost” murmured Zeno, extending a hand through the bars as best he could, so that the bird could perch on his fingers. “Fly away, since you can! This isn’t a good place!” The bird appeared to not understand him, which was unsurprising, though he did smile a little bitterly at the memory of Seiryuu’s songbird, the memories some of his clearer ones despite the intervening years. A quick, delicate creature with bright feathers and dark eyes, perched on her master’s shoulder or fluttering up to the ceiling above Abi’s head, though never too far away.

This bird was drab in comparison, but it cheered Zeno a little nonetheless, especially when it began to sing.

Not that birdsong ever lasted very long, Zeno thought a few hours later, as another rainstorm set the cage swinging and spinning, dizzying him and stealing all the warmth from his body even as it drained the colour from the surrounding land.

It was the rope that held the cage secure to the hook above that gave out first; apparently the villagers knew their craft when it came to making cages, for the lashing of the bamboo bars stayed tight, but the rope above frayed at last, succumbing to the constant wear of the twisting weight of the cage in all weathers, day and night. Time always won, in the end. Things of this world were not designed for him, Zeno often thought. He was an anomaly, the span of his years leaving him fitting wrongly everywhere.

Still, he was grateful when the cage did at last fall, breaking open with the impact on the ground. He had been sleeping at the time, or as close to sleep as he ever got these days; a strange sort of waking dream, in which he chased shadows whose faces he couldn’t see, interspersed awareness of the howling of the wind and the gentle swaying of the cage. But all of a sudden he was jolted from the state as the ground rushed up to meet him, pain exploding all over his body as he hit, the breath knocked painfully from him.

By the time he was fully awake he was lying face down in a pile of bamboo, the knotted string holding it together finally broken by the impact. Much like many of his own bones, he realised as he saw blood on the rocks underneath him, gritting his teeth against the dull, thudding pain in his head. He blinked away the blood that was dripping into his eyes from a wound on the crown of his head that felt like grating bone - _again, it was always the skull… why were human skulls built so weak and fragile anyway?_ \- when he touched it. It was already healing, a rather uncomfortable process. His legs were broken too, and a broken splinter of bamboo the length of his arm had stabbed through his solar plexus, he realised as he tasted blood at the back of his mouth. he pulled it out, impatient, throwing it aside onto the rocks with a clatter as muscle and bone knitted back together.

By the time he was getting up to leave, the vultures must have smelled his blood - spilled and dried on the rocks, though there were no wounds on his body - for they were circling overhead again, despite the storm. Perhaps they’d never been very far away at all. Zeno even felt a mild sense of regret as he prepared to leave them behind, even as he retied the band of cloth that bound his hair back, the familiar clink of the glass beads that hung from his medallion grounding him a little.

He turned away after that, leaving behind the smashed cage, the vultures circling, the rocky cliffs and scree slopes themselves, the village at his back. He wondered again how long he had been up there, but time wasn’t such a meaningful concept in situations like this, he had come to find. 

Days and weeks and months were useful when one lives a normal life, a human life.

For Zeno, it was all waiting; a waiting that might never have any end. It was senseless and irrelevant to portion it out in little human intervals. He thought of the cage, with its wooden spars, broken in time by the wind and the weather. Even the house he had been helping the villagers to build would be broken to pieces by the grinding pressure of time, the years slipping past it like sand. One day the timbers would split, the roof would collapse, or the wood would rot and swell, and it would fall just like the cage. 

But it wouldn’t matter by then, because it would outlast the need it had been built for.

Unlike cages though - whose occupants were usually supposed to die - the house might be built anew, Zeno thought. Houses were for living, not for dying.

Things really did come back in time, Zeno mused, as he turned his face towards the sun that was just starting to light the undersides of the clouds in rust-pink at the horizon, as the last of the storm vanished over the mountains that dwindled into the distance behind him. People came back, living their ordinary, fascinating lives. Lives that came around again, after a while. 

One just had to be prepared to wait. 


End file.
